Be Here Now

At a recent rehearsal, I had my first real exposure to Meisner technique. I'd heard about it, and might have done some of his exercises in college, but I never really thought about it or even knew what it was about. Turns out, it's all about getting actors to do what good improvisors do naturally -- live in the moment.

Meisner, trained as a concert pianist and later as an actor, developed his technique in the 1940s to get actors to "live truthfully under imaginary circumstances." His exercises were at first a reaction to the Stanislavski-based Method Acting, developed by his mentor Lee Strasberg, which encouraged actors to access past memories to gain character insight. Meisner Technique goes one step further, maintaining that actors should play their own truths in a moment-to-moment interaction with their fellow performers ... while, of course, performing the written text.

In other words, Meisner wanted actors to improvise, to feel their characters emotions and live moment-to-moment as they speak the lines written for them by the playwright. So he developed a series of exercises to train actors to do what good improvisors do automatically: be present and react realistically. In improv -- and in long-form improv especially -- you have to. If you're busy planning what you're going to say or do next, you'll miss an offer that would have led you to the next logical thing. Sometimes that offer is spoken; sometimes it's physical; sometimes it's something in the environment. But if you're not present and open to inspiration, you're going to miss it.